‘1964’ Review: Meet the Beatles

The Beatles’ first tour of America, in February 1964, was a musical sensation, recalling the rock ’n’ roll energy that Elvis had given the world a decade earlier. It was a cultural watershed, announcing the coming of a new generation. And Beatlemania was a media phenomenon, erupting at exactly the moment the Canadian critic Marshall McLuhan had coined the term “global village.” Telstar had been launched in July 1962, providing instantaneous communications across the Atlantic. As the world shrank, opportunity knocked—precisely when everyone wanted younger heroes. The Beatles happily obliged.

Paul McCartney’s book of 275 photographs from that period captures the white-hot intensity of the Fab Four’s arrival on a new kind of stage, which not even Elvis had glimpsed. Titled “1964: Eyes of the Storm,” it depicts, in both image and text, life inside the center of the hurricane.

“Eyes” is not a typo; there are many people looking at each other. The photographers who never stop clicking, and Paul, clicking back. Winking, you might almost say, because there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to many of these giddy images, stolen from the back seat of a limousine, or the aerie of a hotel window, or backstage before the set that transfixed 73 million Americans on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Mr. McCartney is having a moment, and it’s not a senior moment. A month after his 81st birthday, he is remarkably spry, hot on the heels of a series of book and film projects. He promises a “new” Beatles song—a vintage demo digitally remastered, with AI-enhanced John Lennon vocals—later this year.

We have been hearing his own voice for a long time—“When I’m Sixty-Four” was recorded 56 years ago. But the unrolling of these various papyri has brought renewed vitality to a story that is ever fresh. It is not just the beauty of the music, but the originality of the Beatle-ideas, still relevant in a world that struggles to inspire new generations.

No Beatle ever left an autobiography, although George Harrison remembered parts of the story in his 1980 book “I Me Mine.” But now it feels like Mr. McCartney is getting closer. “1964” opens with a chase scene, as fans race down West 58th Street, trying to catch up to Mr. McCartney’s car. They never do, but throughout the book, they try. Mr. McCartney is not always the photographer here; others in the entourage were involved. But the book is shaped by Mr. McCartney’s sensibility, and by his captions and commentary.

The images capture something specific. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson used the phrase “the decisive moment” to describe a perfectly timed photograph. It might also apply to 1964, when history was clearly turning a page. Camelot has ended, horrifically, and World War II is long over. It feels relevant that we are looking through a Japanese Pentax at a band who served an apprenticeship in Germany. One photograph shows a Beatles poster that incorporates a second photo, taken by the band’s friend in Hamburg, Astrid Kirchherr.

Many of the images are like that, stories within stories. The Beatles may have been prisoners of their success, put through their paces by manager Brian Epstein, but they were seeing a lot. A striking image of Lennon, taken within a car, shows him looking back through thick, black-framed glasses. The sight of a policeman’s gun, alongside the motorcade, occasions a thoughtful reflection on gun violence. Unmentioned by Mr. McCartney is the fact that two members of the close-knit Beatles family, Lennon and roadie Mal Evans, lost their lives to bullets.

The Beatles were in New York in 1964 but also in Liverpool, London, Paris, Washington and Miami, and we see all of those places, in a story arc that brings us from darkness to light. At the beginning, in Liverpool, the black-and-white images are so murky that it feels as if the city’s soot is getting into Mr. McCartney’s viewfinder. By the end, all is blazing color, as if the Beatle has been following his own advice in “I’ll Follow the Sun.”

Many images speak powerfully about people as well as places. Jane Asher appears luminous, like a Vermeer. A two-page spread captures each face in a crowd in Miami, prefiguring the “Sgt. Pepper” cover. One fan holds a chimpanzee, as if to inspire a song that has not yet been written, “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.”

Not every image achieves this clarity; some are blurry, as if Mr. McCartney is simply moving too fast. But together, the pictures capture a sense of something even bigger than a journey; a transformation, or as the Germans might call it, a Bildung. In more than a few places, I was reminded of Robert Frank’s photo-essay “The Americans” (1958), with its similar studies of highways and hotel rooms. America is changing as quickly as the Beatles are, and the world will never be the same.

The civil-rights movement, like the Vietnam War, is heating up in the same decisive moment. It is present here in glimpses of African-American workers from a speeding train, and snaps of such fellow performers as Ronnie Spector, Clarence “Frogman” Henry and the Exciters.

Mr. McCartney touches on all this in a foreword, which also acknowledges his debt to his late wife Linda, a talented photographer in her own right. One of the reasons that the Beatles remain so compelling is that they asked us to look and to think for ourselves—to question all mythologies, including their own. A photo from a car reveals a remarkably self-possessed girl—she can’t be much older than 13—staring at Mr. McCartney, unflinchingly, as he stares at her. That honesty, one imagines, is precisely what he was looking for with this astonishingly immediate portfolio.

Mr. Widmer is Distinguished Lecturer of the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.